By Michael Beddow [www.mbeddow.net]; edited by Charles Muller [www.acmuller.net]
If you installed Mandrake with Japanese as the primary language, the IME should be present and working from the start. If however, you installed with a latin-script language as your default, you need to take additional steps.
1. During the installation, on the very first screen (choice of language for install), click the Advanced button and select "Japanese" from the scrolling list of additional languages. If you omitted to do this, do an "upgrade" install from your original CDs, select "Japanese" under the "Advanced" menu as just described, then take the defaults in all subsequent menus. NB you must have ALL THREE installation CD's to get full Japanese support. CDs 1 and 2 alone are not sufficient.
2. If you start your KDE or Gnome desktop from a console prompt, you can go straight to step 4.
3. If Mandrake is configured to boot straight into your KDE or Gnome desktop, you will need to get to a full console prompt. (loading a terminal window from within KDE or Gnome will not do).
3a. Close any documents or applications you have open on your desktop, then press Alt-Ctrl-F2. This will produce a console login screen. At the prompt login as root.
3b Now carry out steps 4 and 5 below.
3c After completing step 5 give the command
shutdown -r now
and allow the system to reboot. (If you want to avoid a reboot, try the command
killall X
instead, but this may not always have the desired result). Once your desktop reappears, you can carry on from step 6 below
4. At console prompt as root user, do:
/usr/sbin/localedrake
5. Select Japanese from scrolling list, then OK
6. start X (thus far tested only with KDE and Gnome)
Gnome will immediately start up with a Japanese interface and menus, but in the case of KDE, further steps are needed
6a. Don't be alarmed at the plethora of question marks at KDE startup, and on the desktop and menus. They'll soon go away.
6b. Go to Control Center, select Personalization, then Country and Language and in the r.h. panel change the charset to ISO 10646-1, then Apply.6c. quit and restart X (or log out and back in to KDE if it's set as your default interface)
6d. KDE will restart with normal (Latin) text restored in menus and icon labels (and any Gnome specific apps you run will now be labelled in Japanese).
7. Start Mozilla, OpenOffice, some other standard office-type program or a Japanese-supporting teminal window (JTerm etc). Xemacs is supposed to work as well, but seems to have problems.
8. Press shift+space. An IME Window should pop up. You'll probably want to resize its window with the mouse. If this doesn't work and you have a Japanese 106-key keyboard, try the Crtl+kanji/hankaku key combination.
1. Test at your root console to see if the IME was properly installed during the setup:
rpm -q kinput2-wnn4
this should respond with
kinput2-wnn4-v3.1-0.1mdk
2. If it responds with
package kinput2-wnn4 is not installed
3. then mount CDROM 3 in your drive, cd to /mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS3 and then do:
rpm -Uvh kinput2-wnn4-v3.1-0.1mdk.rpm
which should install it. If this file is not on your CD, you can download it from an RPM download site, eg rpmfind.net or a Mandrake distribution mirror.
4. After installing the file, restart X start it up again as in #6 above.